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Last week I was at the Product Management Festival conference in Zurich. It is my first time attending the event and I think won’t be the last. In this post I will share some bullets from the different sessions I attended, and other thoughts.

First, a note on accessibility

The event venue was a big cinema theatre. The theatre was multi-floors and the event was on 1st and 2nd floors. I arrived and found the elevators require a key to go anywhere including outside of the building. And it was the same for the accessible bathroom. I waited for 10-15 minutes to find someone to take me up, by then I was boiling in frustration.

I can tolerate an inaccessible place but can’t tolerate an accessible place with stupid rules. So instead of going to the keynote I went straight to one of the organizers and told her this is unacceptable and I need a key during the event duration. She said she will talk to the theatre managers and get back to me.

I went to the keynote and when I came out, she said they refuse to give me a key because I am not an organizer. I told her I am not a normal attendee and I can’t wait 15 minutes every time I want to move between floors. You can tell them I am an organizer. I can sign you something to give the key back but I can’t spend the event this way. Upon my persistence she gave me her own key.

Later on the day one of the main organizers came to me and said she wants to make sure things are going well with me. She was nice and gave me her phone number in case I faced any problems. On the second day they gave me a key in the morning and it was all fine since then. 

I don’t know if being part of Zalando which is a sponsor of the event played a role in this. I hope not. I also don’t expect people to be prepared in advance with solutions to accessibility issues, as they don’t often have attendees on wheelchairs at conferences. However, I expect them to be smarter when there is a solution and try to implement it instead of accepting the first no. If I wasn’t persistent I would’ve suffered every time I wanted to go somewhere.

The most interesting takeaways

The keynote by Glassdoor COO

• Glassdoor has big information asymmetry compared to other communities. This comes from employees as content creators not working at many companies of which they can submit reviews. This led them to enforcing the “Give to get” concept in which they ask users to submit a review before they can get access to reviews and salary information. It creates a friction but solved the problem on the long run.
• The data is shaped by the questions you ask. That’s why they ask 3 questions for every user submitting a review: What’s good about the company? What’s bad? And what’s the message to the management?
  
• Monetizing vanity: Glassdoor monetizes companies’ desire to look good and optimize their profile (Similar to LinkedIn’s look at who viewed your profile). Also their desire to see reviews on the CEO (I didn’t know this option exists).

Start-up PM vs. Enterprise PM by Tom Leung

• This talk resonated a lot with me. Having worked at both big and small companies. I will just share the slides that had the best advice.
• One question that was asked was about communication: The answer from Leung was that good PMs can summarize anything into 3 points. The audience laughed at this answer and I felt close to it as I really like the number 3. I even try to never have two points for an argument. It sounds stupid but it is psychological.

Ask Me Anything with Mark Hull, Director of Product at Facebook

• There wasn’t much interesting in this session, but one answer I got to a question I had about how Facebook prioritizes between competing products other than the newsfeed (e.g. Groups, events, marketplace…etc). He said something along the lines of you have to really fight for it, which felt honest to me. He also said they try to mitigate this by personalization. Each user gets a different navigation based on what they browse.
  
• One interesting observation is how he sounded like everyone speaking publicly from Facebook. He is probably well trained to repeat the same narrative around how slow they were to react to the current mess, or he heard it so many times that it became easy to repeat. Impressive lesson in consistency.

Nailing Measurement: a Framework for Measuring Metrics that Matter with Josephine Lee and Isha Mehta, Atlassian

This one resonated a lot with me as it is one of my biggest criticisms of the German work culture. I call it action driven vs result riven. Output vs outcome sounds nicer.

Building for the next billion users with Menal Mehta, Google

• This talk showed Google’s long term thinking beyond the moonshots. They see how the next billion users are coming from the rising income levels in places like India, Mexico, and other emerging markets.
• Menal showed how big the efforts they are doing on the ground by sending different teams to these low income, low tech penetration locations and talking to users there.
• Two questions I asked her since I am from a developing market myself: How do they ensure these insights are reflected in the product designs and not lost in translation? And How do they engage governments since they can make or break things?
• • For the insights she said they try doing this by sending the team often to those locations, and by having some locals on the ground to keep bringing those insights.
• • For the governments she said that’s a topic by itself (I can imagine).

Pricing as a Product Feature by Kapeesh Saraf, Head of Growth at Coursera

• I liked the part about how price drives user behavior. Coursera got more completions when they changed from a per course pricing to a monthly subscription.
• I also liked how he mentioned that after some point, adding more price points and options led to more confusion on users mart and more debt on the developers side. Don’t do this.

Becoming a problem solver by Michael Perry from Shopify

• This talk was perfect. The narrative. The arguments. The solution. The story. It was a master show.
• Michael talked about how all the focus on technology, trends, experience, and solutions costed him a lot of his time and effort. And how focusing on the problem is the only thing that matters.
• The loop he described in the slide below was the biggest takeaway for me from the conference. I fall into it all the time. It is really hard to genuinely focus on problems.

Closing thoughts

Overall it was it was worth attending. I saw many interesting thoughts. And there were ones that weren’t as interesting. But in general it felt good to see the grass on the other sides, and see that everyone is having their own problems, and if we don’t have those problems, we wouldn’t have our jobs.

Note: The illustrations are definitely not mine. They were done by Carlotta Cataldi.

Netflix doesn’t make all subtitles available in all locations. I am not sure if there are contractual georestrictions on subtitles. I expect the answer to be that it depends on the show.

I think when there are no georestrictions they limit the number of available subtitles out of convenience. This way you don’t get a long list of available subtitles to choose from.

This causes a problem though. In Germany they don’t show Arabic subtitles. The closest they could get to a minority is Turkish and Russian. In Japanese anime it is worse, they only show Germany subtitles. Not even English.

I really hope someone at Netflix fixes this.

If you are not interested in the details you can scroll to the photos directly.

Yesterday I had a great adventure going to the top of mountain Pilatus. I wanted to experience something Swiss and was deciding between the mountains and the falls. I ended up choosing the mountain as most people told me it might be tricky to go through the waterfalls with the wheels.

I went to Zurich central station and asked for the most accessible way to get to Luzern. They told me the app has an option to select only accessible trains. Sadly there was a bug in the app and this option was returning no results on the English version. They even were surprised and took photos of my phone to report the bug.

It turned out there is a train that takes 50 minutes and it runs every half an hour (make sure to check the schedules as they change and also the train models). I bought a one day ticket Zurich <> Luzern and was ready to go.

From Luzern central station I took a bus that took 11 minutes to the base of the cable cars. The only challenge was that the street leading to the cable cars was too steep. It is a 10 minutes walk that took me almost 30 minutes as I had to go in zig zag to avoid flipping with the wheelchair.

Once I arrived to the cable car station I bought a ticket and was ready to go. There are two options either to go up with the cable cars and down from the other side of the mountain with the train, or both up and down from the same side with the cable car. I couldn’t choose the former as I had to book train assistance in advance. I feel I could’ve pushed the lady to let me on the train but I was too lazy to persuade her especially that I wanted to get back to Zurich for dinner. I went with the cable car up and down option. I think the options vary in price too.

One catch is that there are limits on the size of the wheelchair that can fit in the cable car. It has to be manual and maximum width 70cm, length 95cm. With my wheelchair which has a width of 68cm I could’ve had one or two more companions inside the cable car.

The cable car takes 30 minutes and stops in the middle in a place called Frakmuntegg if you want to get out. I didn’t go out as it was in the middle of the clouds with no visibility (you will understand what I mean later). Once you reach the top there is another cable car that takes you to the very top. It takes 4 minutes.

I won’t bother you with more text. To the photos.

I recently heard in different circles that were discussing alternatives to democracy the idea of not giving everyone the right to vote, or to give different members of society a different weight in the voting process.

Educated middle class elites think this way because they are unhappy by populists rising to power through the votes of less educated lower classes.

I am strongly against those ideas. This line of thinking is dangerous and can easily lead to a dystopian, Nazi like society.

Democracy has some issues but splitting society this way will make things worse.

We also collect taxes from those people. They have the same obligations to society just like everyone. They have the right to have an equal vote. No taxation without participation.

Facebook recently has been talking about not optimizing for time spent on site but also the quality of this time. They even went and showed in one of the quarterly results that the average time spent on the service went down.

I heard the same argument yesterday in a Q&A with Mark Hull, a product director there.

I was thinking about this and I think there are two sides of this story, one that Facebook tells publicly and one that sounds more like the reality to me.

The reality I expect is that there is no way to quantify the quality of time spent on Facebook. The closest they can get to that is measuring if users will come back after spending less time on the service. Or by doing some controlled experiments where they ask users about their feelings before and after the algorithm change.

Less time on site means less ads to be shown. It also means ads prices will go up as a result of the number of spots going down. Until a certain limit.

Probably Facebook found the margin they can play with the time spent on site without hurting revenue growth, and sold it externally as time well spent.

It is a cozy city. So far the people are friendly and it is easy to break the ice with random strangers.

But it is not the most accessible. I was surprised to see old inaccessible trams. And it is full of step streets.

On the other side their side walks are paved with asphalt. This is the sign of rich places (like Vienna).

It is not a full hello yet as I didn’t board the plane. I will be in Zurich tonight and staying for few days.

I will be attending the product management festival.

If you are around and wanna grab a coffee, shoot me a message.

I recently cooked two successful dishes. This included the first chicken I can say I would eat again. This is a milestone.

I will start to blog more about my work. I realized I am answering many questions that can be spread out through a blog post. I will start from tomorrow and as a starting schedule I will make every Monday a product management post. I wanted to do Wednesday but realized it is hard to write something long not on a Sunday.

Next week I am attending the product management festival in Zurich. I normally don’t attend conferences but thought it might be a good idea to see the grass on the other side. I will be blogging from there.

I recently got an interesting question about how DevOps look like in a big company like Zalando? While I answered the person I think this would be a good post material. I also had the same question when I joined the company and the team I am in.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow is the first in the Product Monday series. It will be about how to resist as a product manager the urge to interfere in the team’s work especially when you have domain knowledge in the product you are managing. Stay tuned.

I saw someone asking on twitter how you deal with anxiety. I actually had this post in drafts for a while and now is the time to publish it.

There are four elements I think of whenever I feel anxious. I realized they are almost always present whenever I am advising myself or someone I know about how to get through the anxiety they are facing.

Distinguish between what you can vs can’t control

My bones got fractured tens of times. I was already born with two fractures and this continued every year till I hit university. Since university I only fractured twice, but I still have a high risk of fractures for multiple reasons and my case can only get worse.

When you are fractured, in a cast, and can’t move out of bed there is not much you can do. You have to wait for the fracture to heal which can be in weeks or months.

When you live in a chaotic land like Egypt there is not much in your control. From going to a place and finding it inaccessible which is 99.99999% of places, to having your mom’s car stolen and your 60+ years old father having to go to the thief, pay him the ransom, and get the car back.

Those things can break you, make you resentful, or they can make you let go and not bother with what you can’t control. If you can control it, change it, if not, don’t think of it, let time heals. Time heals everything. The good thing is that you always have options, even if they are limited at one point, but the key is to pick an option and keep going.

Think probabilistically

Most of our anxieties about the future are caused by events that – most of the time – have low probability of happening. When you understand probabilities and your own biases you realize that most of what you are fearing is just in your head.

Some ways to alleviate this are by asking: What’s the probability that X will happen? And what are the reasons to make me think of it like this?

When you answer the above questions honestly, even if you can’t remove the anxiety from your head, you will be cooler knowing those bad things are more in your head than they are likely to happen. Probabilities are powerful if you understand them.

Optimize for the long term

As humans we are bad at long term thinking. We only think of the moment and it is hard to think over longer horizons.

We get in relationships not thinking how they might look like in 5-10 years, or when we have kids or one of us is unable to work. We move to new places without asking why we are here and how this will turn out on the long run.

When you don’t optimize for the long term you make part of your brain anxious because it is uncertain about why you are doing such things. Optimizing for the long term especially when making decisions reduce anxiety because you understand the big picture.

Compound

Don’t belittle the little things. Things add up whether good or bad. The day to day doesn’t allow us to see the small incremental progress we made. One good way to visualize this is to compare yourself to where you were 5-10 years ago. You are probably better. But you didn’t realize it back in the days. Now it is the same, but it is about the future. Compounding is slow magic.

Those are my tactics to deal with anxiety. As with any considerably good life advice, it is easier said than done. The key is to keep trying, surround yourself with good people, and try to gain small wins to keep you going. Good luck.

I went to a book club for the first time. The discussion was about Harari’s latest book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”. I didn’t read the book but I read his first book “Sapiens”.

The attendees said that most of the ideas are repetitive from Sapiens and Homo Deus. It makes sense as I don’t expect someone to publish many original thoughts in 3 books over 3 years. I got the same feedback on Homo Deus already so wasn’t expecting much.

Big part of the discussion was on the dangers of AI. While most of the attendees were tech people, I felt they were exaggerating the dangers of AI on humanity. I still think with every technology wave be it the industrial revolution, the world wars, the personal computers, and the internet there was fear of people losing their jobs. It is true that some couldn’t adapt and lost the jobs but the sum of opportunities was far greater. I think the same will happen with AI. I understand it might be harder to adapt to the new world, but I think it was the same with personal computers and we ended up fine.

Another discussion was on whether capitalism is the right system in the technological era. Most saw it is not. Yes the wealth gap is increasing, but I still believe in capitalism making everyone’s life better.

We also discussed belonging and nationalism. This reminded me of a discussion I had with a friend earlier. He told me I have the solution to all human wars and problems. I expected him to say something stupid. Then he said “We need a new enemy. If aliens attack earth tomorrow, we will all be united to fight the aliens”. It is true to big extent.

Overall it was an interesting experience.